Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday August 14, 2011 @08:28AM
from the singularity-prequel dept.

theodp writes "'Booting up was a bear,' recalls Slate's Farhad Manjoo, 'something to be avoided at all costs.' But now, he adds, 'It's time to rejoice, because all that's in the past. Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster. Apple's MacBook Air loads up in 16 seconds, and machines based on Google's cloud-based Chrome OS boast boot times of under 10 seconds. Even Windows computers are fast — with the right set-up, your Windows 7 laptop can load just as quickly as a MacBook.' Perhaps at home, but how's that working out for you at work? Have reports of the death of long boot times been greatly exaggerated?"

Windows in 30s on an SSD, 60s on a USB3 and even 15s on a SSD Sata III. Proof that disk speed is half the battle.

However, employees still expect to get to work with everything exactly as it was when they left the office. If anything, it's been heavier workloads which have made users less likely to boot. Some have never restarted. It's fine with me, the less chance of BSOD or loading circles the better.

SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.

It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.

Sure a MacBook Air can boot in under a minute. It also can't run most of what we use and costs WAY more than the average business computer.

Probably so, but it's not like he has a choice in the matter. If you're running a corporate PC with Windows, you have to run some highly restrictive and cumbersome antivirus package. That's just the way it is, thanks to Windows' crappy security. Plus all the other crap the IT department might load onto their PCs: remote backup software, IT big-brother software so the IT people in India can take over your computer whenever they want, weird custom scripts, etc.

Hah, what a troll. Here is a clue retard - get over your zealot fanaticism, your giving Linux users a bad name.

My method has consolidated three physical machines into one, yielding an actual power savings. It makes management easier, and has multiple nice side effects, including standardized hardware from the viewpoint of the Linux installs. If the setup could have worked in a reversed configuration (Win on Linux) I would have run it that way, but graphics performance goes to shit that way, so it didn't

Have you seen what his work PC actually loads? His experience matches mine with the shitload of crap many multinationals put on their desktops. 10 minutes in not far fetched, even with a good SATA drive. He doesn't mean that his machine is "not booted". He's most likely logged in and he can move his mouse, but actually "doing" anything is extremely slow because the machine itself is still loading so much due to the initial login.

One of the biggest things I remember noticing with the Vista RC years back was how much less time I spent waiting for random apps to start during the booting process. A big problem with XP and earlier OSes was that MS didn't have any code to start applications sequentially, which would result in them all rushing to get data off the disk at the same time.

Even now, the time it takes me to boot my much faster desktop with a much faster disk is a few minutes longer than what it takes me to boot my laptop. The main difference being that I've got XP on my desktop and 7 on my laptop.

No, GP's talking about inventory management software scheduled every 3 hours (and bootup), defragging scheduled for 1AM (postponed until next boot), software update scans scheduled for 4AM (postponed 'til next boot), virus and spyware scans scheduled for 6AM (postponed until next boot), not to mention full POST during boot (a minor pain compared to the others because it doesn't taunt you with an unusable windows login screen).

Are you running on IDE? One good sata spin drive for $40 and you'll be booting in 2 minutes. You don't need SSD to experience normality.

You missed the bit where he said "Work PC". That means it's so loaded with enterprise-grade crap and the need to run eight hundred boot scripts that need to download more crap over a network with a latency worthy of a satellite link that it's going to take 10-15 minutes to boot even with a liquid-nitrogen-cooled i7-EE and any kind of SSD you care to mention.

To get a fast boot, the solution is to not run a metric buttload of crap. My Atom-based netbook (pretty much the slowest PC-grade system you can buy) gets to its XP desktop in under 20 seconds. My work machine running Win7 Enterprise, McAfee,three more pages of enterprise-grade bloat on high-end hardware takes a solid ten minutes minimum before I get a usable desktop, and then another several minutes clicking away the Adobe update dialog, the Java update dialog, the another page or so of additional crap before I can get any work done.

+1. My computer at the place I worked until very recently took at least 20 mins to boot up. That's not an exaggeration - the routine was: get to work, switch on computer, go for a coffee, come back, check on computer, realize it's still booting, wander office to find other people waiting for their machines to boot and make small talk for several more minutes. This happened to over 500 people each day, all whom made at least a six figure salary, so we're talking about $2M+ in lost productivity annually. And

The SSD costs more than banning Facebook, which will recover an unproductive 3 hours / day.

From my experience, people will have (and need?) downtime during the day whether you get rid of some distractions or not. They will just make other things the distractions in the amount they can get away with and you won't end up with any more throughput and will have decreased morale. Take it from someone that used to study workers behavior as a profession and give the efficiency studies to the employer, we usually throw out the first couple days of data. After a couple days of the inspector checking work times and such, workers go back to their normal routine and ignore the inspector.

That is why it is better to pay for performance and goals than it is for time (where the job allows). Let them manage their own time, just get the job done when it's supposed to be done. (Again not all jobs obviously can be setup this way)

Sorry, but this is idiotic. We're not factory workers, we're knowledge workers. The human brain just doesn't work that way, and needs breaks to think about something different. I'm not advocating everyone surfing on Facebook all day long, but the idea that every single thing you do during the day needs to be related to the business is wrong. We salaried workers are already expected to put in (unpaid) overtime to get things done on schedule (assuming the schedule is realistic), so the other side of that

Yah, I've been seeing that kind of crap a lot lately, even at small companies. Its a cash flow problem, they have to pay the salaries, but they don't have the money for anything else. Doesn't matter if 1/2 the people on salary are sitting around wasting their time doing something an automated process could do.

The perfect example, is the last company I worked for had their top paid developer spending weeks hunting down memory leaks, and crap like that in their product. He kept asking for bounds checker, but

It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls)

That's what bugs me. Windows 2000 took a while to get to the logon screen, but once you were there you were pretty much good to go. XP put the logon up a bit earlier before the system was really ready so Microsoft could say "hey look - we booted faster". Windows 7 even more so.

Wow, some of the times in this thread are just crazy long. We measure the performance of our boot from the "starting windows" screen (simply because different hardware takes a different amount of time in the POST test / BIOS, but typically only about 8 seconds or so). We measure until the network icon in the system tray shows that it is connected to the internet. In our experience, this is about the same time that the machine will start to respond correctly to input and allow the user - for example - to sta

It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.

A ten-minute delay for an employee working 50 weeks a year, 5 days a week, is 2500 minutes or 41 2/3 hours of work, a 2% increase in time when the employee can be working. If the computer has a 4-year lifecycle, that's 4 weeks of work at an 8 hour day.

That time may be utilized with up to 100% efficiency depending on the habits of the worker, e.g. if the employee checks work mail or does some other routine action on the computer before working, and does not pipeline another task during the time his computer

Yeah, but short-sighted managers don't see it that way. They figure the employee has to get x amount of work done in a year, and if the computer slows them down then they'll just have to work that many more hours to make it happen so that they don't lose their job in a down economy.

Sure, that improvement might save $8k per employee, but in the mind of a budget-oriented MBA they don't see that $8k unless they can cut bonuses that year. The $8k is largely unmeasurable, and if it can't be measured, it must n

It takes my work PC about ten minutes to get to a working desktop. Probably two minutes to actually boot to windows, three or four to get to the Windows logon (anyone who works Windows domains has learned that if you don't have some wait times built in, policies may not load and you get support calls), then another three to five after I log in for all the scripts, antivirus, citrix, and other crap to run before my desktop is fully functional.

50 weeks a year, (assuming you are in the US and not some slacker euro country where everyone gets off 6 weeks a year) times 5 days a week, times 10 minutes a day, divide by 60, that's more than 40 hours a year watching the computer grind away.

That's assuming you turn it off every day, which you would do, of course, because you need to conserve electricity and not waste the company dime.

If a SSD would massively reduce boot time, and the cost of the SSD and the time to build the comp is less than what th

SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.

You must either have never used an SSD-based computer or live in a different world than me. My first SSD (Vertex2, sandforce) was the best single improvement in system performance I've ever made. The boot time is fast, but the application launch time (esp. huge apps like Photoshop, VMWare and Eclipse) are a world of difference. In the case of Eclipse, it finally made it usable for me.

I've since installed small boot-SSDs in some of my older laptops (some even SATA1) and have given them a second life.

I do software engineering for control systems and some of our software is fairly old... We're talking early 90s for the windows based configuration tools, and 70s for the actual hardware it resides on...

The software does not cache anything. There was no ram for this when it was written... This means that if you copy a sheet of function blocks to a new controller it manually reads through about 50000 files, and a huge nasty database and checks for duplicates on every single 'tag name' for blocks and input/output blocks... Copying 2-3kb of data generates anywhere from a gig to 15 gigs of hd-access...Yeah, this is a cluster-fuck.

In this specific case an SSD is a glorious piece of hardware. It cuts down the copy slowdown of this software suite by an insane amount. I used to spend maybe 10-15 hours a week just waiting for the software to move stuff from controller-to-controller but now dont have that issue at all.

The company I work for has about 122000 people last time they bragged in a department meeting, and have recently (this summer) moved to ONLY get new machines with solid state drives in them. There will be no spinning media in laptops.

Hell, we install SSDs in the control room clients on oil rigs even as there is a lot of vibration and heat/power consumption is a major issue there.. (The operators love us since it cuts down on the noise too:p)

Saying SSDs are too expensive is asinine now. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of having someone sit on their arse waiting for a slow pc...

And back in the 80's there were also systems that required multiple hours to boot up.As computers require more reliability, the boot-time initialization and checks require more time. That's where most of the boot time comes from, AFAIK.

My Vista install used to boot up from boot manager to usable desktop in 15 seconds. The only thing non-standard is the fact I'm booting off of a pair of striped drives. Also, I disabled a lot of the services I didn't use or did not want. After a couple of years of use, with quite a few programs set to run on startup, this had risen to about 25 seconds IIRC.

Currently it takes forever, because one of the hard drives in the stripe seems to be dying - it's got awful access speeds, and often won't register at

My system has SSDs in it, and the UEFI is by far what takes the longest. On power on it takes 29 seconds for the UEFI to finish its crap and hand things over to Windows for boot. From there it takes about 15 seconds to get to a logon screen, mostly because there is tons of hardware to start up. From logon screen to responsive desktop is only about 3 seconds.

My laptop actually boots significantly faster (it also has an SSD). It's BIOS takes much less time to hand off to Windows, and Windows starts faster, pr

I reboot my work PC on the weekends because some of the craptastic applications we're stuck with don't do well if they've been running more than a few days. Bad application development is the cause of MOST of these types of problems.

Why leave it on if you're not going to use the thing for hours and hours (or, in the case of work computers, days)?

I mean, I get that it's a pain in the ass to wait the few minutes for your PC to boot, and I get that some computers must always be on as a function of what they're doing, but really, if it's not being used at all, WHY keep it on?

In the case of the individual it may not make a huge impact in energy usage versus the computer sitting idle all night, but if everyone did it I imagine that the amount of energy saved would be enormous.

I understand, and for situations that require the thing to be left on I have no problem with it, but a LOT of people don't leave their computers on for any reason other than "sigh...waiting for my computer to beep and boop is a pain in the ass"

Nobody likes to sit and wait for a few minutes while their computer boots (well, for anything, really, who likes waiting?) but is a few minutes waiting for boot in the morning really worth the energy cost in the thing being on all night long consuming energy for no reason at all? Hell, by the time I'm done taking my coat off, getting my morning cup of coffee, and looking through the stuff shoved under my door after I left, the thing is sitting there waiting for a login, which takes me approximately 1.3 seconds to type...so really, where am I losing all this time again?

I find it hysterical how many people are concerned with that handful of minutes waiting for a boot but can stretch a trip to the bathroom to take a piss into a 15 minute excursion and see no problem with it. Funny how that works...

Absolutely, since it's not unusual to walk in to an "emergency" (as defined by somebody who could fire me) that needs to be handled in less time than it takes to bring the computer up to a usable level.

That's a perfectly acceptable reason to leave the computer on, but really, let's be honest here, how often does that really happen? And does that happen to every person that uses every workstation in the office? And of all those people that could fire you, are they all so pressed for time that waiting for a boot is beyond their tolerance level? And if that's the case, isn't there already a policy in your office that states "do not power down your machine because those seconds waiting for boot are that cr

Sounds like you could benefit from running GNU Screen [gnu.org] on a server somewhere (assuming all those sessions are SSH or other cli friendly interfaces to the various places you do stuff).

Multiplexing is a great way to keep those sessions open and allow you the same access from other nodes pn the network. Besides, desktops really benefit from regular reboots - helps clear out the memory leaks and all.

Hibernate the machine - copy RAM contents to a file on hard drive, shut down the machine. On bootup, file is loaded back into RAM. Takes only marginally longer on system with reasonably fast hard drives, and allows complete shut down of the machine. You can have your 30 sec full boot up without having to pay SSD premiums.

Downside is that some programs don't like it and break, but these have been fewer and fewer as time passed.

Just because the length of time it takes to boot is decreasing doesn't mean it's going away.

I mean, yeah, I no longer have time to go get a cup of coffee and look at the mail while I wait (unless I'm using my parents computer), but I still have to sit through POST and all that. Seems to me that will never go away, there needs to be a self check...

Seems to me that will never go away, there needs to be a self check...

Has this self-check helped you in any way in the last 10 years, unless building the machine yourself? You'd think that at least the memory check would be good for something, but it isn't, otherwise we wouldn't need something like memtest. On most OEM computers, you simply get the logo of the company who made the computer... Not even the "useful", but "scary" information the computers of yonder showed you (Usually you can enable in in the BIOS to do that, but not on all machines).

Anecdote: I had this weird situation where I got a dumpster sourced laptop. It had only 256MB RAM, I played around with different sticks to see if it would boot. Booted fine, so I thought... Nice, now it has 512MB RAM, I'll install Debian... During the PXE boot install I get a big red dialog telling me that there was not enough memory. I was really "WTF!?!". Turns out that I didn't insert de DIMM deep enough and that it booted with 640K, which this particular machine had on-motherboard (which is very rare...). The OEM screen showed right, up without errors. So those self tests don't do much in the first place.

Try having a defective CPU? Won't even boot... Self test? A few beeps if you're lucky.

As a dumpster diver, I get all kinds of machines on my desk. It's always fun to find whatever failed (if something failed, often it's just a certain OS from Redmond that got heavily infected). The POST is useful to me, but not all that useful... To most end user, just a dialog "Sorry, hardware is broken" would be more than enough.

I build all of my computers myself. Believe it or not, I am one of those people that actually used beep codes and such back in the day, and I actually turn off the vendor logos of my motherboard so I can watch the POST. I get that there aren't as many of us left in the world, but there is still use in POST. I know a lot of people out there don't understand what they're looking at when they watch those system checks, but for someone that does, they are an invaluable tool in figuring out what the hell is g

When I leave work, I hit the power button and the computer starts sleeping. When I come back I hit it again and I'm back to speed in a few seconds. I do a boot after windows updates (and/or when I want the centralized updates) and go drink coffee in the meanwhile. So no, I don't have problems with long boot times.

my iPhone 3GS takes about 30 seconds to shut down, and about 35 seconds to boot. And when I say 'boot', I mean it's ready to go, not like the Windows definition of "there's your login prompt - you're booted". If it ever plays up I can be rebooted in under 90 seconds, and it hasn't actually needed rebooting since the last firmware update.

Unlike my previous Windows phone which took ages to boot and needed rebooting a couple of times a week.

It does depend on your definition of "boot time" though. Getting to the login prompt is completely different from getting to the desktop and having all of the various AV and other corporate IT management software and other sundry login scripts and apps stop thrashing the disk to the point where you can actually do something useful. The standard default for corporate login scripts seems to be to check if the corporate LAN is reachable and if so:

Push down the current IT policies, even if they haven't changed since the last login.

Download the latest version of any AV signatures, even if they haven't changed since the last login. (The AV is, of course, configured to do a full scan of the PC when new AV signatures are downloaded.)

Start an audit of the installed software on the machine.

Push down and install any outstanding software updates/upgrades.

The best way I have found to speed up the corporate boot process is to disconnect the LAN cable until you are at the desktop, and then restore any drive mappings etc. manually. Even then, it can take several times longer than at home...:(

Short story: I was a consultant and the PC hadn't been in use in about a month. What happened? Installs and reboots and more installs and more reboots, forced AV scans and whatnot. Mandatory, automatic and unstoppable. After that one extreme incident, the client made sure to boot and log in to that PC before I came, easily shaved 15-30 minutes off their bill on average. Employee PCs were usually woken and updated remotely at night though, wasn't an issue for them.

The parent is spot on... work and home machines are different beasts entirely. What it means to boot in the home setting is a fractional subset of what needs to be accomplished on boot for a work machine.

If I may add to the list of work place boot killers...(1) Drive decryption. In my industry, this is a government requirement and a common sense moral necessity, but dear Lord does it kill my boot time. Just getting through the login process (which precedes the boot loader) takes a minute.

A good corp login process should do the bare minimum; ours maps the required drives and does a check to see if it's time for the user's 6-monthly contact details update (and if so fires up a form for them to complete). There are Group Policies in place as well, but they only update anything that's changed since the last application and are pretty low impact user-wise.

AV updates on its own schedule & scans out of hours, audits run at a random period within the first hour after logon and software updates

It is not only about boot time, it is about time to get ready to do some work. At home I can use sleep mide and it is all back very fast. At work I need to login several programs with difference passwords and logins. The profile needs to be downloaded from another country.

Sure there might be solutions to all of those, yet none of the several companies I have worked for have any of those.

At several I just lock the PC and turn off the screen, no matter what IT tells me. In one company it took 20 minutes befor

At my last contract, I was given a corporate laptop - good recent hardware with Win 7 on it, perfectly capable of booting in 60 secs. However the build on it took 2 mins to reach the log-in screen, and a further 5 mins to reach a usable desktop.

This was because there was so much corporate cruft to run before I could be permitted to do actual work.

Servers take a long time to boot because they have lots of hardware that has to be set up and configured. It isn't as simple as a desktop. Sure on a desktop system you might have one drive controller, and it might just be AHCI and thus require minimal config time. So that part is fast. However on a server you can have some heavy hitting RAID controllers, that run their own little mini OSes complete with web servers and shit. They take a bit more to configure. Also they can't start all their disks at once, t

Back in the days when i used an Amiga, it booted in 6 seconds from cold (yes i know, i was sad enough to time it)... And i had to reboot fairly often because the AmigaOS used a flat memory model which suffered from gradual memory fragmentation, and allowed one errant program to take down the whole system.

Later, i moved onto Unix/Linux systems and although they sometimes took a long time to boot, it was extremely rare that you would reboot them.. One of my unix workstations clocked up 700 days of uptime before a power failure took it out for instance.

More recently, with laptops i can just suspend them...

I hate the concept of having to reboot, i usually have a large number of programs running and would hate having to load everything up again and lay them out across my workspaces.

I use the same mouse and mouse pad at home and work because I got used to the feel. At home, if I press the power button before hooking the mouse back up and putting the mouse pad down, it's already finished booting and waiting for me before I finish. At work, I can go make coffee too before it's done, and that's just to get to the login screen. After loging in, it's another full minute before I can use it.

Let me tell you how it works out at work. I just took delivery of brand new HP ML350 G6 servers. 48GB RAM, Dual 6 core Xeons at 3.06Ghz. FAST!

It takes exactly 2.5 *MINUTES* before I get the BIOS beep for it to load GRUB. Linux then takes, oh, 20 seconds to boot (all the way to X), and that is with dozens of services, RAID checks, etc.

I complained bitterly to HP. Sure it won't be booted very often ONCE IT IS CONFIGURED. But it more than DOUBLED the first few man days of setup due to waiting forever every time I made a BIOS change, every time I had to key in a firmware license, upgrade the BIOS, boot into the RAID setup, setup iLO2, after kernel changes, etc.

It is 2011 and the fastest computer I have ever seen is, by far, the slowest booting machine I have ever seen. And I have been doing this for 25 years.

My company installs so much virus scanning, monitoring, automatic software management agents, and hard-drive encryption stuff that they can turn the highest end, fastest booting machine with SSD into a retro X86 in a few seconds... Most of us either NEVER turn the computers off or you turn it on and go n a long coffee break while your computer boots....To quote a friend - Software is like a gas - it expands to fill every piece of hardware capability

If boot times are getting, quicker, then surely this means booting is easier and more likely to be done? This seems like the opposite of "the death of booting".

Frankly, the new technologies that allow me to boot up my computer and resume my work where I left off in a matter of seconds make it much more likely that I will turn my computer off when I'm not using it.

I've never understood the machismo behind "345 days without rebooting". Unless you're a mission-critical server.

I fired up an old win-95 machine about a year ago out of desperation, the thing could go from power off to running word 95 in about 10 seconds flat, I was really impressed, and somewhat saddened by how far we have moved backwards since then.

My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.

My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.

Yes they can. It's a policy issue. Someone at the top who doesn't actually use the computers (or does any useful work, probably) decided they wanted to implement Policies A-Z to all users on the domain, without any regard to performance. I've run into this a number of times from high(er) security customers that give me a laptop I'm supposed to develop remotely on, and I have to come back and ask, 'are you aware that you've made this otherwise fast machine completely unusable to people working remotely over

Well, not sure what you can do as a contractor. You need to figure it out yourself. But if it's a real performance hit, it's holding your career down. If you are at 50% speed, and distracted by long waits, you'll not only lose time, but concentration, disposition and interest. That's a sure way to stall your career, just because of a stupid person in IT.

I've seen one model works well. You find the solution for them. You then raise some concerns about that issue and place it outside of it...like if it was to

I'm more interested in the death of roaming profiles. In most cases, they are a total waste of resources and greatly degrade the boot process on office PCs.

We've finally done away with them at our office, and it makes a noticeable difference. Once we realized almost no one uses a computer that isn't theirs, we couldn't figure out a good reason to keep them. Instead, they were replaced with folder redirection and the half-dozen people who frequently logged on to conference room computers were told to save their presentations to a shared folder instead of on their desktop.

By the time the cow-orkers' managed laptops get through with virus checks, update checks, etc. there's plenty of time to go for coffee and maybe a bagel.

Fortunately, I only have to listen to them bitching since I'm not using Windows. I don't even have to say anything any more, just quietly smile. They then go off on all the reasons that they have to have Microsoft, and thus mission accomplished: they've gone from complaining to the counting the benefits.

From the beginning of the Windows boot process, to a fully populated and usable desktop, takes my home PC only 9 seconds (no exaggeration, I just timed it). The little Windows animation thing doesn't even half-finish before vanishing. In fact the BIOS takes significantly longer than loading Windows does.

The reason?

- New Corsair Force SSD; and- I made sure that nothing runs on startup that I don't need

The shut down is even more ridiculous. The "Windows is shutting down..." message barely flickers onto the screen before the machine shuts off.

So yeah, I don't use sleep at all now. Just power down and power back up later. Prior to the SSD my startup took at least 3 times as long (and that was with a 10,000 rpm Raptor, which is no slouch). Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability.

I was booting Windows in 20-45 seconds since 1997. Linux can sometimes take a while but usually it's around the 30s and under mark. I'm pretty sure the only laptops that I've ever seen take more than 10-15s, over the last 15 years, are broken Vista laptops.

This sounds more like the expectations have been lowered then that the problem has been solved. 30sec or even 15sec is still quite a long time, given that my C64 could boot up in 1 second. Even for PC those boot times are nothing special, as DOS or Windows95 could do the same. It also doesn't really matter if its 15sec or 30sec, as both are way to long for quick switching. If booting would be as fast as switching desktops or VTs, it would make OS switching a non issues and could allow new workflows across

I don't care about my PC's boot time, it boots about once a week. The rest is Deep Sleep, and I go fetch a coffee in the mean time anyway.I don't care about my phone's boot time, it boots about once a month, and is in light Sleep the rest of the time.I care a little about my netbook's boot time. Usually Deep Sleep though, but I'm usually waiting on it to be ready, so faster is better.I'm incensed by my cheap Android tablet boot time. It takes long (1 min ?) and switches off daily due to sucky battery. And s

Can we all agree to enforce mandatory penalties for programmers (or their bosses) who create services and systray apps?
Something that makes them really think about whether or not it's necessary to put some bloated application in my system tray.
I'm thinking a wedgie for unnecessary services and a cock punch for unnecessary tray apps.
Apple, Java, Adobe, HP, I'm looking at you...
I'll admit that I really want to give the Quicktime developers a cock punch.

HP550 laptop2Ghz Celeron D1Gb ram5400rpm disk driveTime it takes to start up (and get to a usable desktop) is roughly 40 seconds +/- 2 secondsfrom power on to post = 16 seconds,thenfrom post to desktop [as well as manual login] around 28 seconds.This is from a stock install, I've not got around to tweaking things to cut any boot times...

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 not Windows (windows, no matter the version, added another 40 - 65 seconds to boot times on this laptop!)

In the organization [irs.gov] from which I just retired, we had a standard metric for basic laptop health. Assuming the user quickly and without errors types in two logins and two passwords, the time from power-on to a "settled down and usable" desktop was 8 minutes. Once in a blue moon, we'd see someone achieve 7 minutes on a new machine, but 8 was the standard. If boot times stretched past 15 minutes, users generally knew to open and ticket and get a tune-up.

I know of about 120,000 users who would jump for joy at boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes.

Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster

30 seconds is something to be ashamed of, not brag about.

The Apple II had a boot time measured in milliseconds, and most of that was making the beep sound.As time wore on, boot times got longer.

A thing of the past? No, long boot times are a relatively recent phenomena.They will be with us as long as software quality is less important than time to market.I predict they will die, but not until Moore's law stops, or at least slows down enough that we start thinking of a computer as something we won't replace until it breaks.Only then will we care about software quality, size, and efficiency.

Oh God, McAfee is evil. Especially when they have it locked down with a group policy that prevents you disabling it or changing the scan settings.

My work has it set to scan all files on both read AND write. Slow, yes. But nothing compared to the pain when you have to run a VM (which I do often), which itself is based on the same standard corporate desktop image. So you get McAfee in the VM scanning on every read and write operation, while a second instance of McAfee is also running on the host, scanning on